How to Make Great Presentation Slides

I’ve seen a lot of presentations that..well…could be very much improved.

But if there’s anything worse than seeing a bad presentation, it’s giving a presentation that you know is not great with no idea how to fix it.

That is a very rough feeling and I don’t want you to have that feeling.

I’m going to give four little things you can do today to really improve your presentations. These are ones that I’ve actually used for my own presentations.

Use a numbered list

The first thing is I recommend you use a numbered list. The reason why I want you to use a numbered list is because you want to have a structure to your presentation.

Like a plot in a play or the sheet music for a tune, a structure with a goal in mind (like you’re going to talk about point A, then point B, then point C) really takes away a lot of the performance anxiety and nervousness.

So, before you actually do your presentation, have a numbered list of the points you’re going to cover.

Outline before you start

Before you actually start creating your slides, don’t touch PowerPoint. Instead, open up Microsoft Word and go to the outline section. Or if you prefer, take out a pen and paper and actually outline your presentation.

Once you put down your numbered list of the most important things you want people to know, go underneath each element and put three sub-bullet points for each section.

This actually helps you flesh out your argument and flesh out your presentation in a way that makes it flow much more better.

Use a black background.

The reason why I want to use a black background is because when you put a black text on a white background it overwhelms people. It’s like when someone puts a white screen in a movie explosion to shock you.

A really easy way to really immediately improve the effectiveness of your slides is make the background black and the text white.

You want to have it look a little bit like the credits in a movie. It’s going to naturally relax people’s muscles and make it easier for people to listen to you and observe your presentation.

Don’t use bullet points

There was a study that showed that bullet points actually make you retain less information. The reason why bullet points are so bad is because when you have a lot of text on your slide and you’re speaking, people can’t listen and watch at the same time.

When you talk and show text, you’re actually taxing people’s brains more than they can handle. Which is why so often people fall asleep. It’s because their brains are on overload and they cannot process.

Here’s what you do: For every piece of your outline, create a different slide design with a different text and a different font size. The key to the font size is I want you to make the font REALLY big. At least like 60 or 70 points. A good rule of thumb is the bigger the font the more bad-ass your presentation is.

Think Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or TED Talks – they never use bullet points in their presentations. They always use big text. Sometimes as much as like 100 or 120 points.

You might say, “Well what about if I have these three different sub-bullet points because you told me to make three sub-bullet points?” The key to that is to make each sub-bullet point is its own individual slide.

Now it does make your presentation longer, but because they’re all part of the same idea, you’re just going to click right through them. Your presentation’s actually going to flow a lot faster.

Final Thoughts

If you just use these three tips, you’ll be well on your way to creating awesome presentation slides. However, you might be wondering what tools should you use to create these slides. So, to help you out, I’ve created a short checklist of the tools I use for my presentations. Just click the link below to grab it!

How do you make your presentation slides? Let me know in the comments!